Have been job hunting for about two months now specifically for a junior developer role, and during that stretch I have rebuilt my personal portfolio site completely three separate times, each time convinced the previous version genuinely was not doing enough to actually stand out among what I imagine is a fairly large pile of similar applications recruiters are presumably looking through for any given open role they post.
My current version has a reasonably clean design, three small projects displayed with links to both the live demo and the actual code repository for each one, and a short personal bio section, which honestly looks fine to me whenever I look at it myself, though I genuinely have no clear way to know whether it is actually working the way I intend it to for someone else looking at it with fresh, unfamiliar eyes for the very first time.
Asked a friend who works in technical recruiting what she personally actually looks for specifically when quickly glancing through a candidate's portfolio site during her own screening process, and she mentioned that a live, functioning demo matters considerably more to her than the code itself initially, since most recruiters at her particular company genuinely will not actually dig into the repository unless the candidate first clears an initial resume screening stage successfully.
That was somewhat reassuring to hear, since two of my own three current projects do actually have live working demos already, but it also made me specifically wonder whether the overall visual design of the portfolio site itself matters anywhere near as much as I have personally been assuming and worrying about this whole time during the rebuild process.
For anyone in an actual hiring or recruiting role themselves, or anyone who successfully landed a role fairly recently, what genuinely made your own portfolio site actually work in practice, beyond just the standard generic advice of "have some real projects" that most articles online tend to repeat?